To release Samba 4.0 'as is'

[Volker Lendecke]

On Wed, Nov 30, 2011 at 08:44:52AM +1100, Andrew Tridgell wrote:
> Hi Volker,
> 
> > To end this discussion, maybe we should admit that Samba 4.0
> > will not be a valid successor to Samba 3.6.
> 
> I strongly disagree with this. What we have in master right now is a
> superset of Samba 3.6, so saying it is not a valid successor is not
> correct.

If we keep the S4 fileserver in and easily activateable or
even the default for the simple AD DC, then this is just not
true. From my point of view the S4 fileserver does not have
all the capabilities that the S3 fileserver has. Same goes
for winbind. Those are programs with a different set of
capabilities, thus a different project with that deserves
its own release schedule.

> We have all of the capabilities of Samba 3.6, plus we have the
> additional capability of being an AD DC. The fact that you start a
> different daemon to be a AD DC and get different components is not
> reason enough to abandon our efforts to unify the codebase.
> 
> > This probably also means doing the releases from different
> > git branches, as we tend to step on each other's toes much
> > too often.
> 
> We did that for years, and it was not good. Since moving to a single
> branch and doing merge work to unify the code bases we have made a lot
> of good progress which has benefitted all the roles of Samba. We now
> have a lot more code in common than we did a year ago and we are making
> steady progress towards a fully unified project.
> 
> The fact that we are not completely unified yet is not a reason to
> abandon that effort. All we are trying to work out is release points,
> and exactly what components must be unified for a given release name.

We MUST split up again. If the S4 fileserver and winbind
need to prevail for the reasons you stated, it will be
released on a separate schedule. The existing team
supporting the S3 components does not have enough resources
to support a separate fileserver implementation.

Volker

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